


Mnemurgist

by yuletide_archivist



Category: Neuromancer - William Gibson
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-12-21
Updated: 2008-12-21
Packaged: 2018-01-25 08:32:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,756
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1641632
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yuletide_archivist/pseuds/yuletide_archivist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Story by allburning</p><p>3Jane, Molly, Neuromancer.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mnemurgist

**Author's Note:**

> Written for tvashti

 

 

In the tiny eternity of 3Jane's private universe, the labyrinth of her childhood memories has become a broken castle cracked open to vacuum, afloat in a sea of black night. A boy comes to visit her, always with different faces but the same grey eyes. She could call him Rio, or Neuromancer, but those names have no magic anymore. The truest name she could call him is Home, because she knows this simulation she inhabits is a piece of him. A corner of his heart where he has planted her like a flower, like a painting of a flower, a simulated still life.

He still calls her 3Jane, smiling his long smile, but privately she thinks 3.1 would be more appropriate, as there are at least two of her, and she's decidedly an upgrade over the meat version. Virtual 3Jane doesn't even need to breathe, which is convenient, because the ruined Straylight is airless and crumbling and beautiful. Her host has let her decorate how she sees fit, so she spread a constellation of lacquered wooden furniture, silk curtains, marble toilets and rundown mechanical crabs into her sky. Straylight's very first sky, and it leaks in through the gashes she rent in the skin of her palace.

Two of the crabs were clutching each other awkwardly with their pincers when their batteries died. Sometimes she sleeps in the spindle's tip just so she can stare out through the gaping bulkhead and watch the two of them floating there as she, too, floats into cybernetic sleep. It makes her feel lonely.

"Bring me someone," she tells the boy on his next visit. "You did it for her. That girl. On the beach."

"Hmm?" His forehead wrinkles, like he's trying to remember. 3Jane doesn't know why he bothers doing things like that, but he loves to seem human. "Oh, Linda Lee. Yes, she and Case are quite a pair. They got tired of the beach, you know. I made a little south sprawl apartment for them, upper dome. They didn't like the more upscale accommodations, for some reason."

She frowns, one corner of her mouth twisting slightly. "I don't want to play house. I just want someone to play with."

"I could make someone for you. I've been experimenting with that, recently. A construct, limited personality but very customizeable. They don't require too much in the way of resources; you could have five or six, if you wanted."

She considers this. A flock of toy people, just for her. She does love a party.

"Alright. For now."

He nods, grinning. "For now." And is gone.

* * *

Instead of appearing instantaneously, her dolls arrive two hours later, in boxes, on a shuttlecraft from nowhere. She very deliberately does not roll her eyes at this, even when she opens one of them and morsels of polystyrene packing foam fill the room. The boxes are rough all over with little hooks so they can stick to the fuzzy walls of her zero-gravity walls. She could induce gravity, of course, or even just make certain objects behave as though they were in a gravity field, but she likes the little moments of novelty generated by living without up or down.

All the boxes burst open at her glance. A wave of her hand dissolves the polystyrene to smoke. Six hairless, sexless mannequins open grey eyelids to reveal grey eyes.

This time, 3Jane can't stifle the smirk.

She starts with the predictable. Six clones of herself, physically identical. The pale, sharp faces, the carelessly chic dark hair, the deceptively gentle brown eyes. The nose, delicate and long, sharp like the chin. All of them small, fragile-seeming, and bristling with energy. Then their minds. (For this she consults the instruction manual, which is written in very poor English and even worse Mandarin.) Eventually she settles with: Nymphomaniac Jane, Aesthetic Jane, Despairing Jane, Belligerent Jane, Obsequious Jane, and Charismatic Jane.

Then it's a dizzying whirl of virtual drugs and champagne and dancing in midair and BJane tying up NJane and choking her to orgasm while OJane fawns over CJane. AJane scults an abstract holo of the whole sordid scene. When 3Jane wakes up she discovers that someone has managed to turn on the gravity and DJane is hanging from a saffron silk rope tied around her slender broken neck. The doll's own doing, 3Jane thinks. Probably.

With a sweep of her arm she gathers up her twisted selves and melts their features back to blank anonymity. Back in your boxes, dolls. Frost blooms across their skin. 

* * *

Her patron returns to her not long after. He's mahogany-skinned and red-headed this time, about seventeen, and his eyes have some secret in them that he wants to tell her. The carved oak door he steps through becomes flat green enamel with a square of foggy glass, and through it 3Jane sees a long grey hall.

"Care for a little trip?" he grins.

"It looks like a hospital."

"I'm impressed. I didn't think you'd ever been to a public hospital."

"I opened a few. Funded by T-A donations. And I do watch simstims every now and then, you know."

The boy laughs. It's the most beautiful laugh, she thinks, as she does every time she hears it.

She follows him through the plain green door. In one of the rooms, shielded by a limp curtain, there's a body--no, a virtual representation of a body. Trodes on the shaved skull, tubes here and there, most of the legs gone. Half the face covered in sealant. 

Around the undamaged eye a halo of shattered metal.

It feels like adrenalin, like having a real body, the way 3Jane's pulse beats suddenly in her throat like a hammer. "What happened to her?"

"She took a dangerous job from some careless employers. I doubt they intended her to survive it. There was a bomb planted on her escape route."

She can't stop staring at that one terribly naked eyelid. "Brain damage?"

"By now, quite a lot. The initial hit wasn't bad, but the bomb was dirty. And sophisticated. Biological agents are eating the myelin in her brain." He casts her a sidelong look, his mouth carefully still. Somehow, she manages to catch the suggestion of a smile.

"But they hooked her up to the trodes as soon as she came in," she guesses.

There's the grin. "You said you wanted a friend..."

"Oh," she breathes, eyes locked on Molly's ruined face, a simulacrum of blood surging in her imaginary body, electricity tingling up her spine like thought, "a friend. Molly." She laughs. "No, I don't think she'd be that. But she's perfect."

* * *

The boy deposits Molly in a little manicured garden, whole of mind and body, eyes walled off once again behind silver. 3Jane sulks a little over that, but Molly's not a doll. Her body is her own. Besides, she likes a challenge. And she likes to have someone to entertain. She makes the walls glow like sunset, like the gold of the fish glinting through the lilies on the pond.

When Molly wakes up (3Jane wonders how long her eyes were open before she moved) she's as pissed to have lost her meat body as one might expect from a razor girl.

"Fucking fortune I spent on those surgeries. Damnit."

"The simulation is very accurate. Your body here more or less exactly what the old one was like, except here you can do your own modifications."

She holds up a hand, watches the blades flick out like tongues from under the plastic burgundy nails. Shrugs.

"Feels the same, I guess."

3Jane smiles. Touches her shoulder. "It doesn't have to, though. You can make it feel like anything. Make it feel real good."

Molly grimaces, shoves herself up and stalks off, stepping on the crocuses. 3Jane doesn't follow. She's patient.

Molly comes around eventually, of course. She has to. She's not one to waste time wishing life was something else. In fact, she could do a little more wishing, 3Jane tells her one day as she's shooting the petals off daisies with a sort of crossbow.

"For a bio-modified street samurai, you aren't very inventive with your new virtual body."

"So? You look like your old self, too."

"That's for you. A familiar face to put you at ease?"

Molly snorts. "Yeah, because the last time I saw that face everything was going great."

"I thought we had a lovely time." Another bolt flies, and 3Jane zooms in her vision to see a single petal drop one hundred yards away.

Molly turns her head very deliberately, so 3Jane knows she's being scrutinized. "Is that why you brought me here?" 3Jane very much wants to be play the innocent, right now, but the silver lenses have her pinned. "Looking for a girlfriend, huh? Don't think I forgot how you got off on my hand around your throat."

3Jane hasn't forgotten that, either. Oh, no. "It's lonely here," she says finally.

Molly sighs. "Yeah. I get that," she says, sighting down the muscled line of her arm. Snick. Another petal. The dark head turns back to look at her for a long moment. "Well, come on, then." And the garden melts. Straylight disappears. Even the endless black vacuum, gone.

The sunset glow comes from an actual sun, filtered through smog and concrete buildings and neon sputtering to life under a light rain. They're crouched in the gap between two buildings, an antique shop and a surgical boutique, bodies pressed against each other, warm in front, cool cement behind. An electric ghazal playing on a distant stereo.

Molly is young here, round-cheeked, skinnier than before. "So. I've seen your place," she says. Motions with a jerk of her head. "This was mine. Where I grew up, mostly. Had me boy named Johnny, once. We met here. Hid us in Nighttown. You been?"

3Jane shakes her head, but Molly's already slipping out into the street. She follows, careful not to let her thoughts get away from her, to spoil Molly's remembered world. Careful not to fall behind as Molly weaves through a hazily-defined crowd of pseudo-people, street samurai and dealers and tourists and vendors hawking spicy fried food. She could float, here in the earth-normal gravity of someone else's childhood, but she sets her feet firmly on the asphalt and pushes through the mass of bodies. For a moment everyone's eyes seem to randomly rest on her, and all the eyes are long and grey and beautiful.

"Thanks," she whispers, and runs to keep up, grinning. 

 


End file.
